Center Stage: The Voice of The Project Economy - Digital Experiences and Technology-Enabled Transformation

Digital Experiences and Technology-Enabled Transformation

03/30/21 • 32 min

Center Stage: The Voice of The Project Economy

In this podcast, Jason Warnke and Joe Cahill discuss the impact of digital experiences on technology-enabled transformation.
Jason Warnke serves as Senior Managing Director for Global Digital Experiences at Accenture. Digital Experiences is located within Accenture's internal IT leadership team and is responsible for driving technology-enabled experience transformation.
Jason leads off by sharing examples of how technology in our business lives has not kept pace with what we have experienced in our lives as consumers. Many companies build their internal capabilities with a “technology first” mindset that can sometimes inhibit workflows, productivity and engagement that drive business performance.
Shifting to a focus on employee experience looks at the impact of making it easier for employees to get things done in a digital way. Jason shares examples related to reducing multiple applications, making the user experience more intuitive, building applications into the flow of work and other tips. From a project delivery perspective, Jason discusses shifting from a requirements focus on what the employee believes is needed to truly understanding the intended outcomes the employee wants to enable, the service experience they expect, etc.. It is also about prioritizing capabilities so employees get the functionality that is most useful for them.
Social networking and creating a “culture of cultures” is another area Jason explores. In a highly distributed organization, organizations need to recognize that employees can build community in ways that are different from approaches that work in highly centralized environments. In addition to work networks, organizations can help connect employees via social networks where they already engage, such as clubs for exercise enthusiasts, XBOX players, photographers, etc. This approaches recognizes that it is as important to build connections around interpersonal engagement, with people outside of the core team and among team members around the globe.
Discussing new ways of working, Jason concludes with a focus on how digital transformation is changing project work and creating opportunities for leaner workflows.

Previous Episode

The Power of Leadership Emotions

In this podcast, Dr. Rodolfo De Acutis, Global PMO Lead R&D at Nestlé, and Joe Cahill discuss the leadership of emotions and the critical role of power skills for PMO and portfolio organizations. Dr. De Acutis shares that project leaders and change makers face a range of emotional triggers when engaging with stakeholders that they will need to manage. These triggers increase stress and can affect a project leader’s performance. He suggests a range of techniques leaders can use to reframe emotional responses, such as reflection and explaining the “why.”
Dr. De Acutis also discusses the challenges facing organizations as they recruit and build their project leaders and teams. He believes that talent equals Intelligence Quotient (IQ) and Emotional Quotient (EQ). Thus, effective project leaders need to balance their technical and leadership/interpersonal skills. He strongly believes that project leaders still need strong technical skills, especially risk management, and need to incorporate approaches like agile and lean to respond to project characteristics which do not fit well with highly predictive approaches. But to rally a team to produce its best results requires building trust and being transparent.
Dr. De Acutis closes with his focus on nourishing his own passion for knowledge and learning so he can continue to positively embrace the future of work.

Next Episode

Creating Standards for Knowledge and Innovation Management

Peter Merrill is leading the development of the ISO Management System Standard on innovation management; Ron Young chaired the BSI Standard committee and was part of the ISO Working Group that developed the Management System Standard on knowledge management. In this episode of Center Stage, they talk with PMI Chief Customer Officer Joe Cahill about how you standardize such abstract concepts.
They explain that the standards focus on establishing enablement systems that can be managed. “We’re not trying to hug an elephant,” as Merrill says, a system is a set of elements which we manage so that they link together. Young explained that standards are based on a set of principles of good leadership and management and contain critical success factors for managing innovation and knowledge. They discussed how organizations can evolve from simply identifying lessons from a project, to actually learning those lessons, changing behavior’s and truly deriving value from project knowledge.
Beyond the standards, Merrill and Young discuss the value of diversity and inclusion, and the role of artificial intelligence in knowledge creation. They conclude by sharing the visionary idea that we are moving into a knowledge economy where scarcity of resources is no longer the primary driver and where collaboration begins to supersede competition.